Practical Positive Thinking - Part 1

It is a sad to me that most people still do not recognize the possible benefits of positive thinking. This resistance to what is really a simple notion comes from a number of angles. Some people may shy away from anything to do with the mind, and dismiss any related subject as nonsense; others may laugh it off as a New Age fad, airy fairy hogwash with no scientific proof, much in the same arena as UFO's piloted by aliens. Some may even have tried positive thinking once for two minutes, saw no great change in their lives, so reverted to normal.

At least with aliens and UFO's you can make movies and television series to make them exciting, but with down to earth positive thinking that is not so. Watching somebody think is not good drama, and results of positive thinking in practice can be very slow and subtle anyway.

Two of the attractions of using positive thinking are that it is easy, and it is free. However, before being convinced that it is something they should use, most people would need to see some quite dramatic and immediate example of its success, which is not easy to find. Given that positive thinking has to be applied over time to bring noticeable results in an individual, a stark and living example of the successful use of positive thinking is hard to come by.

So, what of the positive thinking examples that have happened over time, with a successful outcome? They can be easily dismissed by those who just do not want to believe: “Oh, that would have happened anyway, without positive thinking.” However, if the story is told to a lot of people, maybe one or two people will start to wonder: “Oh, maybe there is something in positive thinking after all.”

I think that probably the most convincing argument in favour of positive thinking is that it is plain common sense. An individual has their own mind, which controls their body and their actions. If that mind is sending out an overload of negative signals all the time, is the outcome not going to sway towards the negative? That sounds like a common sense notion to me, not hocus pocus, New Age, or even some advanced scientific theory. If the mind is sending out predominantly positive messages, then the opposite would be true.

Even without the common sense angle, though, I have good reason to believe the use of positive thinking in my own life has been both positive in its results, and significant in its impact. I am therefore able to support my belief in positive thinking with practical examples, and three of the longer term examples are briefly outlined in the following three articles.